Saturday, July 14, 2012

Pre-Women Rock

This was not a standard garage band. For one, the members had picked out
instruments two days earlier. For another, the jam session ended when a
supervisor called, “Ladies, it’s snack time.”

The band formed at Girls Rock Camp
in Atlanta, which teaches 10- to 16-year-old musical beginners to bang
drums and windmill guitars like their rock heroes. The five-day camp has
a simple message: Girls rock too. In a genre long dominated by men, the
founders want campers to feel as comfortable being loud and expressing
themselves on stage as many boys do.

Oh, to be a preteen in July. These kids are precious, no sarcasm intended. Here's 10-year-old Katherine Butler, whose band Think Fast has already been riven by artistic disputes:

“We’ve had some hard times,” she said. “It feels like we’ve been a band way more than two days.”

And another anonymous rockette:

“I don’t respect Justin Bieber, but I really, really like him.”

Bless. Absolutely darling. But wait.

A similar rock camp for girls opened in Portland, Ore., in 2001, and the
idea has quickly gained steam. It was founded by a women’s studies
student who had worked in the music industry and wanted to encourage
more women to start bands.

Summary: be solo, or a duo, because a full band is financially
untenable; work much, much harder, under much more stressful conditions,
than bands of earlier generations had to. Be very young, or have the
ability to take the broke-ness, the physical and emotional knock-around,
that very young people can.

On a personal level, I have witnessed the impoverishment of many
critically acclaimed but marginally commercial artists. In particular,
two dear friends: Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) and Vic Chesnutt. Both of
these artists, despite growing global popularity, saw their total
incomes fall in the last decade. There is no other explanation except
for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music
without compensating these artists.

Shortly before Christmas 2009, Vic took his life. He was my neighbor,
and I was there as they put him in the ambulance. On March 6th, 2010,
Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart. Anybody who knew either of these
musicians will tell you that the pair suffered depression. They will
also tell you their situation was worsened by their financial situation.
Vic was deeply in debt to hospitals and, at the time, was publicly
complaining about losing his home. Mark was living in abject squalor in
his remote studio in the Smokey Mountains without adequate access to the
mental health care he so desperately needed.

3 comments:

This brings to mind the sort of story that appeared, with some regularity, in Rolling Stone and The Boston Phoenix (among others), back in the day (the day being the early 70's: Can Women Rock?

After deciding that, yes, white men can play the blues, the good folks at various "rock" magazines and "underground" newspapers took up the question of whether women could actually play heavy metal without disqualifying themselves as female (or something like that.) Proponents of the yea would cite Fanny, Suzi Quatro (yup), and maybe The Runaways (Joan Jett, etc.) while those who were of the opinion that vagina = wimp would trot out Carly Simon or something.

I wish I had saved some of those articles, and the "Can white boys sing the blues?" stuff, too. I'm sure they would have been truly hilarious reading by this time, possibly in a class with the "black athletes can't perform in the clutch" school of sports writing from the days before Jackie Robinson. I'm sure the prize would be worth having, but I have no gift for research (which is why I write mostly about myself and make up most of that.)

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"It Is Not Done Well, But You Are Surprised To Find It Done At All."
If you're here for newspaper women blogging about newspapers writing about women blogging -- and ice-fishing -- and drinking Brandy -- and buying Motor-Cars -- and becoming Police-Officers -- and doing all manner of People-Type Things -- you've come to the right place. Welcome to the spleen-o-dome.